I went to a film last week. I almost said I went to a movie, but it wasn't a movie. Movies are from Hollywood, they have pretty girls and handsome men, special effects and capitalistic morals. This - Beau Travail, Claire Denis's blood-melting tale of the Foreign Legion in Djibouti - was a film.

Of course, it was more interesting, more intelligent, stranger and longer-lasting in the mind (in short, better) than 99% of Hollywood movies. That goes without saying. But what haunts me about it is nothing auteurish or filmic: it is the handsome men. The male faces. In fact, one face. One really ugly face.

You know this face, if you've been to the cinema in the past couple of years. It is the bloke in the beer ad: his father is dying, he brings him a flagon of this very expensive beer on the back of a wagon, drinks it and blames the priest. His name is Denis Lavant. In the ad he is an effective clown, with a monkey mug. In Beau Travail, he is the image of humanity. His face is the story. He is fabulous. And he is so ugly.

The other legionnaires are, without exception, beautiful, and their beauty is lingered on, against bleak deserts and burning skies, and very nice that is, too. But his is the face that came back with me. I dreamed about him. If I were 15 I'd put a picture of him on my bedroom wall. I might anyway.

Casting an eye over the Hollywood boys of the day - Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Antonio Banderas - I can't actually remember what they look like. Except that they all look like they're wearing foundation and false teeth. Which they probably are. And then Lavant springs to mind, or Daniel Auteuil as the utterly phallic knife-thrower in La Fille sur le Pont, or the mad, dying king in La Reine Margot, all pock-marked, with hollow cheeks and snaggle teeth. And I think: now we're talking. Why?

When I was a girl we had a concept we called sexy acne: ex-acne, combined with a certain strength of character. I suspect now that this was sexy because it suggested that its owner had a knowledge of suffering, and would therefore be wise. Clear skin suggests a worry-free existence and long nights of uninterrupted sleep. Nice now, but not interesting when you're young. An ugly man carries suffering and experience in his face; a pretty man knows only admiration. The nearest a girl can get to being ugly meanwhile is being incredibly beautiful but tastefully ravaged, like Marianne Faithfull, or all bone structure, like Barbra Streisand. Even so, Starville can only handle one at a time of them, and you don't ever get lady stars with no cheekbones at all and bad skin.

Now, in Hollywood, it seems to me the men are being prettified to the same degree that women have been. Even Richard E Grant has started to look like an airbrushed sitcom person not, as he rightfully should, the devil incarnate. Russell Crowe is as far as ugliness for men goes over there, and Crowe counting as ugly just proves that, according to Hollywood, we should all have major plastic surgery. In fact, we might as well just have our throats cut.

So in the US, Lyle Lovett - truly the most attractive Texan ever, and yes he does look like a parsnip - is mocked and tormented for marrying beautiful Julia Roberts. George Clooney - who is clearly moisturised to within an inch of his life - counts as butch. Gérard Depardieu in his Hollywood films looks as if he has been castrated. Across the real world men are spending more and more on products with which to feminise themselves, and in bars across the land you find bland boy-band lookalikes from 16 to 60. Everybody, actors included, wants to be Friends. No wonder film director Roman Polanski is having to have open auditions to find a man who looks like a vulnerable, damaged refugee.

Meanwhile, Lavant, Auteuil and Lovett show us faces which remind us that beauty is wild, strange, weird, interesting and sometimes very ugly.

Faces that just look like human beings. Like themselves. Like men. Like people you want to watch, want to talk to. Their ugliness evokes both reality and imagination: two things so lacking in US culture.

Oh, and the other really good thing about ugly men is they don't look prettier than you when you go out together.